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Today it’s been exactly two years (woah!) since my last post on this blog, which was about how the blog changed address to http://blog.hanschen.org. Two years is also the time I’ve spent so far on my Ph.D. Coincidence? I think not.

Anyway, since it’s been so long and I’ve received questions asking if this blog had moved somewhere else, I just wanted to give you a quick update that everything’s fineplease save me and that I haven’t completely abandoned this blog yet. I’ve had a few posts saved in drafts for a while but never found the time or energy to flesh them out. Maybe I will someday.

If you’re subscribed to any feeds or have bookmarked pages, please update the links by adding blog. in front of hanschen.org. The old address (hanschen.org) will continue to point to the blog until I’m finished with the new site. I’ll also try my best to keep old links intact.

Please let me know if you find any dead links or other problems (either in the comments section below or in an email, see Contact page).

Preface

I’ve tried different ways of highlighting lines past 80 columns but was never satisfied with the results. Since Vim 7.3 there’s a nice colorcolumn option, but it just didn’t look any good:

Vim with :set colorcolumn=80

It’s not just the red color, which can be easily changed, but the whole “highlight a single seemingly random column” didn’t appeal to me. After searching for inspiration on Google, I found this StackOverflow question with the following screenshot of TextMate:

TextMate with “Highlight right margin” option

Well, well, that looks much prettier. Is it possible to get something similar in Vim?

Many users want the Super key (also commonly called the Windows key and confused with the Meta key) to open the Application Launcher in KDE Plasma Desktop. At the time of writing 145 users have voted for the Brainstorm idea “Super key to load Application Menu” and there are 51 comments. A workaround has been around for a long time which involves remapping the Super key to a regular key, but then you lose the ability to use it for other keyboard shortcuts. Until now, that is. In this post I’ll write about how you can eat the cake and have it too.

Soon Dolphin, the default KDE file manager, also got its own Dolphin forum. Before topics about Dolphin would be shattered around in the Other KDE Software and Workspace forums. We realized that the new Dolphin forum didn’t really fit in any of our existing categories, so the System & Utilities category was created.

Marble is the first application from the KDE Educational Project to join the forums, visit the Marble forum to take a look. Don’t forget hat you still can ask questions about the other KDE EDU applications in the Games & Education parent forum.

KDE Workspace Vision is a special kind of forum where users can discuss what they would like to see in their future workspace, see Dario’s post for more information. It differs from Brainstorm as you’re allowed to post and discuss complete visions, while only single concrete ideas are accepted in Brainstorm.

Finally, we have our newest addition, the Konsole forum. Like Dolphin, topics about Konsole used to be posted to different places in the forum. Now most of them have been moved to their new home.

Meanwhile, the KWin developers implemented a feature in KWin to get useful information for users to post when asking for support. It’s really great to see developers care about helping their users. Martin also proposed a GSoC idea about supporting users directly from the desktop (with a plasmoid), using forum.kde.org. Unfortunately it’s too late to apply, but who knows, maybe someone already did? If it’s not taken and you’re interested in given it a try, you should definitely contact Martin or one of the forum admins (forum-admin@kde.org).

To close up – if you’re a user of any of those applications, the forums provide an easy way to connect with the community and receive expert help from other users and developers. If you’re a developer and want your own forum for your application, you’re just a few click away!

It’s always nice to see KDE developers join forum.kde.org, and especially nice when they request a new forum for their application or project. Lately we’ve had two newcomers, Gwenview and Accessibility – the forum team wishes you a warm welcome! Kontact & PIM has also been split from Office & Productivity due to popular demand.

In this post I’ll talk about why you, a developer or contributor, should consider to create a forum at the KDE Community Forums for your KDE application or project.

Explanation

Keyboard accelerators are letters with an underscore that you see on buttons, labels etc. This feature is very useful for people who prefer to use the keyboard. For example, instead of using your mouse, you can click on OK by pressing Alt+O.

The downside is that it makes applications appear more cluttered. But not anymore. Starting from 4.8 (or did I just not notice this awesome feature until now?), you can configure Oxygen, the default style for KDE applications, to hide keyboard accelerators until you hold down the Alt key, or make them disappear completely.